The Coddling of the American Mind Critical Reading
The Idioms of Non-Argument
What happens when reviewers spend more than time focusing on the motives of authors than the claim of their claims?
Almost the writer: Conor Friedersdorf is a California-based staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs, and the author of the Up for Debate newsletter. He is the founding editor of The All-time of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.
In The Coddling of the American Heed, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff fence that well-intentioned adults are unwittingly harming young people by raising them in means that implicitly convey three untruths:
- The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes y'all weaker.
- The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
- The Untruth of Usa vs. Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
In their telling, the spread of these untruths, especially in the middle and upper classes, helps to explain a fasten in mental-health problems among immature people and recent tumult on the campuses of highly selective colleges. But if parents and educators change class, they contend, they can raise happier, healthier kids who'll plow into meliorate citizens.
I liked the volume, which has its origins in a 2015 cover story in this magazine. The updated thesis, when fleshed out beyond detailed chapters, struck me equally clearly stated, logically argued, and plausibly truthful—and the proposed remedies struck me as highly unlikely to do damage.
"Whatever your identity, background, or political credo," the authors advise young people, "y'all volition be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your ain goals" if y'all do 3 things:
- Seek out challenges "rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that 'feels unsafe.'"
- Free yourself from cognitive distortions "rather than always trusting your initial feelings."
- Accept a generous view of other people, and look for nuance, "rather than assuming the worst virtually people inside a simplistic united states-versus-them morality."
They fifty-fifty include practical advice for conveying those lessons in child-rearing. How significant are the ills that they identify relative to all the others that face up higher education or young people generally? I don't know. But their prescriptions seem sensible, low-cost, likely to help some, and unlikely to prevent other reformers from addressing other problems.
Some critics have praised their work. Thomas Chatterton Williams reviewed the book favorably in The New York Times. Wesleyan University President Michael Roth's Washington Mail service review seemed to endorse the book's advice in its last paragraph.
Lots of folks who responded to the book more than critically argued that it gave short shrift to the thing they regarded as the most pressing problem in society or on campus. Few challenged its core arguments, any they were worth.
Merely I wanted to hear from critics of their central thesis. That's how I plant myself reading Moira Weigel'south review in The Guardian, having seen folks on social media flagging it as a devastating takedown. "Moira Weigel eviscerates with ease 'The Coddling of the American Listen,'" the biologist Stephen Curry wrote. The sociologist Kate Cairns asserted that the review "systematically demolishes" the book, while another observer characterized the review as "an fantabulous shredding."
Imagine my surprise when even that review contained a passage that appeared to grant the potential value of the advice at the volume's very core. Weigel wrote:
Despite the championship, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make articulate that its genre is cocky-assistance. The tips it contains may benefit upper heart class parents. They may benefit students from minority or working class backgrounds who get in on elite campuses to detect that, despite skillful intentions, those campuses accept not fully prepared for them.
It's the sort of passage that would usually appear in a positive review. It is no minor affair to place a trouble that harms families from different economic classes and to offer tips that may help folks in each to assistance themselves.
But equally it turns out, that passage is a brief aside, dissonant for its substantive assessment of the book'south thesis. The review's first paragraph complains that the book doesn't hash out financial hardship among college students (though the authors trace the mental-health trends that worry them back to high school and to the wealthiest families, not the ones struggling to pay tuition). An entire section complains that the book'southward way "wants above all to exist reasonable. Lukianoff and Haidt include adverb after adverb to telegraph how well they take thought things through." Is it bad to want to be reasonable? Have they thought things through? The merits of such substantive questions are rarely Weigel's focus, though. Many critiques are implied rather than stated, rendering them unfalsifiable.
The balance of the review is scathingly negative not in its arguments—a few pop upward along the manner, some concerning peripheral matters—only in its ad hominem attacks and other rhetoric disguised every bit statement every bit though its mere trappings confer heft. An argument can be strong or weak, civil or sick-mannered, calm or heated, edifying or misleading. Fifty-fifty the almost frustrating arguments, though, offer readers more the tropes pervading this frustrating review, and other journalistic piece of work of the aforementioned genre: Allow united states call them Idioms of Non-Argument.
The Guardian review is a useful illustrative example in part considering its unabridged fashion is foreshadowed in the headline that announces the article:
The Coddling of the American Heed review – how elite US liberals have turned rightwards
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's book sets out to rescue students from 'microaggressions' and identity politics. But maybe they just resist change that might undermine them
That display copy says: Never heed the merits of the book'south thesis—what's of import here, beau leftists, is where the authors fall on a left-correct ideological spectrum and what psychological factors may be motivating them. What'due south a truth proposition when at that place'southward an ongoing culture war to fight?
What unfolds over the trunk of the review isn't quite a character assassination of the authors so much as a series of premeditated assaults.
The book is utterly in keeping with the longtime professional interests of both authors, and closely tied to Greg Lukianoff'due south personal experience using cognitive behavioral therapy to fight serious depression. Merely Weigel dismissively speculates that they wrote the book "peradventure, because an article that they published in The Atlantic went viral." Is she implying that the subject doesn't justify volume-length treatment? Some other dig? Is the line merely included to convey contempt?
Both authors have long records of producing work that is intellectually honest; neither happens to exist an ideological conservative. Yet over the course of the review, Weigel compares them non but to Allan Flower, but also to Dinesh D'Souza, and then, using guilt-past-association tactics, to the alt-correct:
Hints of constituent affinities between elite liberalism and the "alt-correct" have been evident for a while now. The famous essay that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in 2016, "An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Correct," cites Haidt approvingly. At one point Lukianoff and Haidt rehearse a narrative most Herbert Marcuse that has been a staple of white nationalist conspiracy theories virtually "cultural Marxism" for decades.
Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right "manosphere" that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.
The commonality raises questions most the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT to the vogue for "Stoic" self-help in the Reddish Pill community, founded on the principle that it is men, rather than women, who are oppressed by society. And then, too, does it raise questions about the subject field of psychology – how cognitive and information-driven turns in that field formed Haidt and his colleagues Pinker and Hashemite kingdom of jordan Peterson.
Are Haidt and Lukianoff correct or incorrect virtually Herbert Marcuse? Is Antifragile a practiced book? Is cognitive behavioral therapy a worthwhile approach? Is there wisdom to glean from the Stoics or the discipline of psychology? Weigel offers the reader no arguments of substance—just the Idioms of Non-Arguments that all of those things heighten questions because ostensibly bad people are tenuously associated with each of them. God assist Kevin Bacon if he'south e'er the bailiwick of a similarly crafted profile.
The embodiment of Weigel's vilification tactics comes a bit later. In the book, the authors recount what they regard as examples of "catastrophizing" on college campuses. Simply the authors as well go out of their style to point out that today'south college students are sometimes behaving totally rationally when they perceive a threat to their physical safety. Among other examples, they flag an apparent ascension in hate crimes, a college student'southward online threat to "shoot every black person" at the University of Missouri soon after Dylann Storm Roof's neo-Nazi murder spree, and the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia.
They write:
Students of color facing ongoing threats to their safe, and seeing frequent reports of threats elsewhere, are non new phenomena; the history of race in America is a history of bigotry and intimidation, intertwined with a history of progress. And yet, this new moving ridge of racial intimidation may be particularly upsetting because of recent progress … The shock of Trump's victory must have been peculiarly disillusioning for many black students and left-leaning women. Betwixt the president's repeated racial provocations and the increased visibility of neo-Nazis and their ilk, it became much more plausible than it had been in a long fourth dimension that "white supremacy," even using a narrow definition, was not just a relic of the distant past.
Judge for yourselves whether passages like that are adequately or unfairly characterized in the role of Weigel's review where she likens the authors to a character in a recent Hollywood film, who kidnaps black people and steals their bodies:
Like Mark Lilla, Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama, who have all condemned identity politics in recent books, [Haidt and Lukianoff] are careful to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses— those who also hate identity politics and supposedly brought u.s.a. Donald Trump.
In fact, the data shows that it was precisely the ameliorate-off people in poor places, perhaps not so different these famous professors in the struggling academy, who elected Trump; merely never listen. I believe that these pundits, like the white suburban Dad in the horror film Get Out, would have voted for Barack Obama a third time.
Cheap shots similar that serve no purpose other than to prejudice readers, and bear not at all on the quality of the book'south ideas. (And not that information technology matters, only famous professors in the struggling university are, contra the inapt analogy to improve-off people in poor places, a demographic that surely voted overwhelmingly confronting Trump.)
Vilification and guilt by association are not the only Idioms of Non-Argument. Misrepresentation is some other.
Consider the handling of intersectionality in the volume. The authors sketch the framework every bit it was articulated by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, now the director of the Eye on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University, and they favorably quote an explanatory passage from Intersectionality past Patricia Colina Collins and Sirma Bilge.
The authors write:
Intersectionality is a theory based on several insights that we believe are valid and useful: power matters, members of groups sometimes human action cruelly or unjustly to preserve their power, and people who are members of multiple identity groups can face up various forms of disadvantage in ways that are ofttimes invisible to others. The betoken of using the terminology of "intersectionalism," as Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED Talk, is that "where there'due south no name for a trouble, you can't see a problem, and when you tin can't run across a problem, you pretty much can't solve it."
Merely then do they add together:
Our purpose here is not to critique the theory itself. It is, rather, to explore the effects that certain interpretations of intersectionality may now be having on college campuses. The homo mind is prepared for tribalism, and these interpretations of intersectionality take the potential to turn tribalism way up. These interpretations of intersectionality teach people to see bipolar dimensions of privilege and oppression equally ubiquitous in social interactions. It's not just about employment or other opportunities, and it's not simply about race and gender.
Their argument is that while the originators of intersectionality and conscientious adherents of the theory offer important insights, some less nuanced interpretations are misleading students most reality by grooming them to run across the world "in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each centrality is marked privilege and the other is oppression."
By way of analogy they cite educational activity tools like this one:
They reason:
Since "privilege" is defined as the "power to dominate" and to cause "oppression," these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people beneath the line are good. This sort of didactics seems probable to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students' cerebral schemas: Life is a battle betwixt good people and evil people.
Possibly their reasoning is flawed or their concerns are not borne out past the facts. But how does Weigel distill that very carefully qualified argument?
For all their self-conscious reasonableness, and their promises that CBT can master negative emotion, Lukianoff and Haidt often seem slightly hurt. They contend that intersectionality theory divides people into expert and bad. Simply the scholars they quote exercise not use this moral language; those scholars talk nigh privilege and power. Bad is how these men feel when someone suggests they take had it relatively easy – and that others have had to lose the game that was fabricated for men like them to win.
Once again, there is a truth suggestion, similar Can CBT help master negative emotion? Just rather than utilize the best available bear witness to adjudicate something so plainly relevant to the book, Weigel casts doubt on the proposition in the reader's mind by claiming that the authors "seem slightly hurt," citing no particular passage, every bit if that should bear upon our faith in cognitive behavioral therapy.
She then offers a misleading account of their beliefs about intersectionality—they are explicit that neither intersectional theory nor the scholars they quote commit the The states vs. Them fallacy—and concludes by asserting how they experience (which is to say, how her ideology tells her that they must surely feel) in a hypothetical situation that she made up.
Later, Weigel writes:
Predictably, Lukianoff and Haidt cite Martin Luther King as a spokesperson for "good" identity politics—the kind that focuses on common humanity rather than differences. Just there was a reason the voice communication they quote was called "I Accept a Dream" and addressed to people marching for jobs.
Keeping faith with the ideal that all humans are created equal ways working to create conditions under which we might, in fact, thrive as. In the absence of this commitment to making the dream come true, insisting that anybody must act as if we are already in the promised land can feel a lot like trolling.
"Tin feel a lot similar trolling" is dense with weasel words, simply what's more than notable here is the clear implication that Haidt and Lukianoff insist "that everyone must act equally if nosotros are already in the promised land."
Subsequently, Weigel writes, "Enjoying the luxury of living costless from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving immature people to activeness are all in their heads." No, they do not so insist! Lukianoff leads an organisation—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Educational activity—that constantly advocates on behalf of students facing unjust discrimination, and battles administrators who violate their civil rights. And their book explicitly states this virtually social-justice activism:
Higher students today are living in an extraordinary time, and many have developed an extraordinary passion for social justice. They are identifying and challenging injustices that have been well documented and unsuccessfully addressed for besides long. In the 1960s, students fought for many causes that, from the vantage point of today, were clearly noble causes … Students today are fighting for many causes that nosotros believe are noble, too, including catastrophe racial injustices in the legal system and in encounters with the police; providing equal education and other opportunities for anybody, regardless of circumstances at nativity; and extinguishing cultural habits that encourage or enable sexual harassment and gender inequalities. On these and many other bug, we think pupil protesters are on the "correct side of history," and we support their goals.
Despite that passage, Weigel goes on to write, "The authors cite the 'folk wisdom' 'Set up the kid for the road, not the road for the child.' They call this attitude 'pragmatic.' The prospect that a group of children might get together to build a new road themselves is not ane they can countenance."
The authors themselves, though, believe they are offering communication to young people that volition brand them more likely to succeed in building a new road.
That brings us to even so another Idiom of Not-Statement: reduction to privilege anxiety. Forget almost counterarguments that accost the claim of a proffer. Simply assert that its advocates fear losing their privileged condition, and obviously acted in order to thwart the rising of marginalized people, and you lot will discredit their project without having to grapple with it at all.
Thus:
… the consensus that has ruled liberal institutions for the past ii decades is peachy up. The media has fabricated much of the leftward surge lifting Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But every bit this new left-liberalism gains forcefulness, a growing number of white men who hold power in historically liberal institutions seem to be breaking right.
As more and more than Americans, peculiarly young Americans, limited enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new correct-liberalism answers. Its emerging catechism commencement defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. Past deriding those movements as "clicktivism" or mere "hashtags," right-liberal pundits besides, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking upwards their monopoly on discourse.
One wonders: What makes the book's thesis right-leaning? How has Haidt or Lukianoff broken rightward? Does democratic socialism touch their subject affair in whatever way? If Lukianoff is motivated by frustration at web platforms for breaking up an elite monopoly on discourse, why does the organization he leads fight to expand the power of leftist higher students and faculty members to post their views without punishment on blogs and social media? And what, precisely, is it near their claim that students are prone to catastrophizing that preserves privilege? A review operating in the mode of statement and ideas would grapple with such questions rather than begging or eliding them.
The Idioms of Non-Argument reward those adept at using volume reviews as a take chances to denigrate ideological adversaries, ascribing to them motives that fit their in-group'southward preferred narrative. Simply they do lilliputian for readers.
The Guardian's review is terribly unfair to The Coddling of the American Listen'due south two authors, but that is of comparatively little consequence. If the book's thesis is correct and its insights are really adopted, information technology could help a lot of people; if it is wrong in a way about people fail to appreciate, it could do harm or impede a search for better solutions. That's why it would be valuable to have a rigorous critique from a skeptical reader. Put another style, testing the truth of its claims really matters.
Just Weigel's look at the book—perhaps the most prominent skeptical review it received—spent picayune fourth dimension arguing about its actual claims. Instead, it focused on the attributes of its authors and how they might be invoked to reify the progressive left'south notions of what ostensibly motivated them to write, or who has the better overarching ideological narrative to advance. This is the problem with the Idioms of Non-Argument. They don't exit us any closer to understanding.
schoenbergpridn1986.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/coddling-american-mind-and-its-discontents/572965/
Post a Comment for "The Coddling of the American Mind Critical Reading"